New federal survey data on the education workforce shows that a majority of schools had a tough time filling at least one fully certified teaching position this fall.
Parsing education data into snack-sized servings.
Public schools reported having six teacher vacancies on average in August, based on responses to the School Pulse Panel by the National Center for Education Statistics. About 20 percent of those positions remained unfilled when the school year started.
The two most common challenges schools said they faced in hiring were a lack of qualified candidates and too few applicants. Special education, physical science and English as a second language were some of the most difficult areas to fill.
NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a news release that while the percentage of schools saying it was difficult to fill positions decreased — down 5 percentage points from 79 percent last year — “there’s still room for improvement.” Nearly 1,400 public K-12 schools from across the country responded to the survey.
While the comparison to previous years suggests that hiring is getting a bit easier, Megan Boren of the Southern Regional Education Board says the country is still mired in a teacher shortage.
Boren, who leads the organization’s teacher workforce data and policy work, says it would be a mistake to think of teacher shortages only in terms of positions filled versus vacant. Other factors to consider include the geographic regions of schools, academic subjects and student age groups where shortages are prevalent.
The organization also takes into account teacher demographics, the number of candidates graduating from teacher prep programs, alternative certification programs and their level of preparedness.
“When we think of it as merely a body count, we are not looking at the whole entire problem and to be honest, we're doing a disservice to our students and our educators themselves,” Boren says. “Of the utmost importance is the quality and the preparedness with which we are filling some of these vacancies, or that we have leading our classrooms, and the distribution of that talent.”
Boren expressed concern over schools turning to uncertified teachers to fill the staffing gaps, be they candidates with emergency certifications or long-term substitute teachers. Their inexperience can put strain on the more experienced teachers and administrators who support them, she explains, at a time when both administrators and traditional teacher prep graduates say even new fully certified teachers feel less prepared than those in years past.
Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods or with a student body that is mostly — 75 percent or more — students of color filled a lower percentage of their vacancies with fully certified teachers, according to the NCES data.
“It's a firestorm where folks are going, ‘What can we do to put out the fire and then rebuild?’” Boren says, “and unfortunately, we're seeing in some cases that the measures and strategies being taken to put out the fire are actually making it worse, and causing an exacerbation of the issues for our educators and leaders.”
She says there’s no single factor that has led to teacher shortages, but rather interplaying issues that include pandemic-related mental health strain, the pressure of filling in for vacant staff positions, and a lack of time for collaboration and planning.
Teacher shortages didn’t start with the pandemic, Boren explains, as her organization tracked a teacher turnover rate that hovered between 7 percent and 9 percent prior to 2020. But she says the pandemic did accelerate turnover, with some regions of the South now experiencing 18 percent turnover among teachers.
“Certain regions of states started to stem the tide, but by and large the turnover is increasing,” Boren says.
Throughout rural America, non-native English speakers are less likely than their urban peers to get proper support in school, sometimes leading to a lifetime of lower educational attainment. But some rural schools are developing multilingual education strategies to rival those found in urban and suburban districts.
In general, it’s easier to fund more diverse course offerings in bigger schools. From Advanced Placement U.S. History to Spanish immersion, more students means more funding. But in rural DuBois County, Indiana, administrators are prioritizing English-learner education. There, students have access to “gold standard” multilingual programming, a hard-won achievement for any U.S. school, but especially for such a small district.
“We are the only school in the region who started a dual language program,” said Rossina Sandoval, Southwest DuBois County School District’s director of community engagement, in an interview with the Daily Yonder.
To meet the gold standard, students in the dual language immersion program receive 50 percent of their instruction in English and 50 percent of their instruction in Spanish. Fifty percent of the program is made up of students whose native language is Spanish and the other half is made up of native English speakers. The program is currently offered from kindergarten through third grade, with plans to expand to fourth and fifth grade.
By developing a program with 50/50 language instruction and 50/50 student enrollment, students are able to not only learn both their native and target language from their teachers, but they are also able to learn from each other, Sandoval said.
“That has proven to be the most effective way to develop language skills,” she said.
When the program was first introduced, the school received pushback from both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking families. Spanish-speaking families felt the school should prioritize English learning, given that their children already speak Spanish at home. And English-speaking families worried that they wouldn’t be able to help their children with Spanish homework.
To address family concerns on both sides, the school shared information about the benefits of formal bilingual education. In addition to maintaining their conversational skills, Spanish-speaking students receive instruction in grammar, spelling and reading in their native language. This approach helps students who already speak another language read and write in another language, too.
Learning two languages does not hurt a student’s ability to master either one. Bilingual children are shown to have better focus and logical reasoning, and — according to Sandoval — will be suited to a wider range of opportunities in the workforce.
“It’s natural, we want the best for our kids,” she said. “The best we can do is educate the community as a whole that this is the best method to develop multilingualism, this is the best method to enhance global skills and produce global citizens.”
Intersecting Problems
The Latino population in DuBois County has been expanding for decades. Today it sits at 9.5 percent, which is approximately half the national percentage. But in Southwest DuBois County schools, more than a third of students identify as Latino. (The disparity in those numbers reflects higher birth rates within the Latino population and the uneven distribution of those families within the county.)
The demographics of rural schools have been changing nationwide. According to a recent report from the National Rural Education Association, 80,000 more English-learner and multilingual students were enrolled in rural districts in the 2021 school year than in 2013.
Historically, rural school districts have struggled to provide high-quality education to non-native English speakers. When English-learner populations are small, it can be difficult to fund robust bilingual programming and easy to overlook their necessity.
Rural English learners sit at the intersection of overlapping structural problems in public education. The national teacher shortage is worse in nonmetropolitan places, and it’s most problematic in racially diverse and high-poverty rural schools. Nationally, there aren’t enough bilingual educators, or educators certified to teach English as a second language (ESL).
According to recent research, while English-learner populations are growing in rural places, rural multilingual learners are less likely to receive instruction in their native languages. And while federal guidelines require that all non-native English speakers receive specialized instruction, in rural places only a little more than 60 percent actually do.
DuBois County’s top-tier bilingual education program should be used as a model in other rural school districts, Sandoval said: “As an immigrant, as a U.S. citizen, I feel very proud … because this can be replicated in communities that look like ours.”
Support for these programs must be built inside and outside the schoolhouse, Sandoval said: “There has to be a degree of openness toward bilingualism or multilingualism. This is an effort that’s not just made by me, it’s made by the school and by the community.”
Programs that increase accessibility and trust with parents include “Cafe en el Parque,” a parent meeting held in Spanish that draws in more than100 families each month, and the “Emergent Bilingual” program, which meets after school and on weekends helps new immigrant students and families learn more about how the American education system works.
Programs that help establish community support and participation include “Fuertes Together,” a partnership with the public library where families can hear stories in Spanish and English and engage with cultural music, dance and art. And a new program, “Bilingual Village,” helps bilingual students identify speaking partners in the community who can converse in the student’s new language.
A Wide Range of Strategies
When Esmeralda Cruz was a child in the 1990s, she immigrated with her family from Mexico to rural Clinton County, Indiana, where she lives and works today. “Back then,” she said, “there were not a lot of Latino families in the area. In my first grade classroom I only had one classmate that was bilingual.” This posed major challenges to her education: Esmeralda said that, instead of receiving proper language instruction, she was placed in classes meant to address learning disabilities.
Cruz’s experience is not unique, according to Maria Coady, professor of multilingual education at North Carolina State University. In places that aren’t accustomed to supporting immigrant populations, she’s seen English learners sent to speech therapy in place of proper ESL classes. “Schools might think that all these kids have special learning needs because it looks like they’re not learning,” she said, “when in fact, they’re just learning the language.”
As immigrant populations grow throughout the rural U.S., newcomers often find themselves in Cruz’s childhood position — navigating school districts unaccustomed to educating non-native English speakers.
Today, Cruz works as a Hispanic community engagement director for Purdue Extension. Prior to that, she was the health and human sciences educator at Purdue Extension office in Clinton County, Indiana.
According to scholars of rural multilingual education, schools that do have ESL or bilingual systems in place exist across a broad spectrum, from gold-standard bilingual education programs like the one in DuBois County to ESL sessions that require students to miss part of the school day and provide no native-language instruction.
In places with very small English-learner populations, Coady said, schools might pool resources and “bring in an itinerant teacher — that is, a teacher who might travel between several rural schools to provide ESL services.”
This is the least effective method of multilingual education for two reasons, Coady said: It’s disruptive to pull students out of class, and ESL teachers are only able to offer very limited amounts of time to individual students.
Where to Begin?
In rural places, small expansions in local industries that rely heavily on immigrant and migrant labor can create major shifts in student populations, said Holly Hansen-Thomas, professor of bilingual education at Texas Woman’s University: “And these teachers may not have the experience or the background to serve these emergent bilingual families that keep coming to work and to support the industry.”
For rural school districts inexperienced in providing multilingual education, said Hansen-Thomas, professional development is the place to begin.
Federal grants are available to support multilingual certifications for teachers and administrators. For instance, the National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition offers a National Professional Development Program, which makes grants to colleges and universities to fund work on multilingual teaching skills for local educators. Hansen-Thomas also points to the U.S. Department of Education’s “Newcomer Tool Kit,” a resource for rural educators looking to support recent-immigrant students and families.
In Indiana, colleges and universities are attempting to build manageable pathways for multilingual educators who might not be formally trained as teachers. “Our pre-service teachers tend to be white and monolingual,” said Stephanie Oudghiri, clinical associate professor at Purdue’s College of Education. “Especially in the Midwest, as our demographics are changing, we need folks that are multilingual.”
Experts like Cruz stress the importance of listening to non-native English speakers themselves when building out these programs. “We’ve had a lot of focus groups and community conversations and I can’t tell you how many times people at the table have said, ‘Thank you for including me,’” Cruz said.
“I think oftentimes they do want to be at the table, they just don’t know how, and so we’re making sure that we’re listening to them and then going from there, rather than the other way around.”
What if why you choose to become a teacher determines how successful you will be in the role?
Society has always been fascinated to learn about the motivations of famous athletes, entertainers, and politicians and how they came to their profession. We think about their career trajectory and consider its relevance to ourselves or people we know. What if, similarly, we learned about the motivations of aspiring K-12 teachers, and used that to predict how effective they will be and how long they will stay in the classroom?
As professors and researchers in university teaching and learning programs, we’re fascinated by this question. We figured that learning more about teacher motivation could help us better understand teacher pipelines and find ways to diversify and improve the quality of our nation’s teachers, so we designed a study to gather more information.
From 2012-2018, nearly 2,800 preservice teachers within one of the largest teacher preparation programs in Texas responded to an essay prompt, “Explain why you decided to become a teacher.” We used a natural language processing algorithm to review their responses.
Historically, people went into teaching for relatively straightforward reasons: They desired a stable career, enjoyed having summers off, or had family members who were teachers. However, across the essay responses, we found that those motivations were not the most prevalent, nor were they related to teacher outcomes — but others were.
Studying Preservice Teacher Motivations
Previously, researchers have primarily looked at in-service teacher motivations. Rather than learning from someone who is already in the profession, we wanted to learn from those who have yet to enter the profession. This better informs our understanding of how to get someone interested in teaching to then aid recruitment.
Using machine learning to process the thousands of open-ended essay responses, we identified 10 broad reasons for why preservice teachers want to become teachers.
The two most frequent drivers were altruism (the desire to do selfless good) and intrinsic motivation (an enjoyment of teaching, helping or interacting with students or children). Other interesting but less frequently cited motivations include the impact of prior teachers, love of a content area, and a family connection to teaching.
Interestingly, motivations differed by preservice teachers’ characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, gender, family income and certification.
For instance, individuals seeking their elementary certification were more likely to enjoy working with children, whereas middle and high school preservice teachers were interested in teaching a particular content area. Relatedly, men were less likely than women to report that they had “always wanted to teach.” This suggests that background characteristics can shape motivations to become a teacher.
Further, and more importantly, we found that some teacher motivations were related to better teacher outcomes. While altruism was the most frequent answer given, it wasn’t the one most strongly correlated with effectiveness.
Specifically, preservice teachers who shared that they were intrinsically motivated to teach and had experienced some adversity within schools were found to be both more effective educators and less likely to leave the classroom prematurely. Individuals who had these two motivating factors had a significant and positive correlation with their clinical teaching observation scores, and were less likely to leave the K-12 public school system within their first several years of entry.
Though these were modest effects, the fact that written self-reports of teaching motivation had even some significance with these outcomes is noteworthy. Motivations are no longer just interesting; they can be consequential.
From Motivations to Marketing
By better understanding teacher motivations, we can learn more about who could succeed in the profession. More precisely, we want to find individuals who are intrinsically motivated to teach or have overcome adversity within education spaces.
These future teachers could be like the following study participant who expressed how adversity and the impact of prior teachers motivated them to become a teacher:
“The statistics are stacked against someone with my background. Living in an impoverished neighborhood and struggling to learn English as my second language, and a daughter of Mexican immigrant parents who didn’t even get to finish primary school … I was fortunate to have many teachers who became my role models … I want to pay forward what my teachers did for me.”
How can we get these kinds of people into the classroom?
First, states need to consider long-term solutions to teacher shortages, including finding and nudging motivated individuals into educator preparation programs. Policymakers could invest in early teaching opportunities such as tutoring programs or summer programs with an explicit design to encourage individuals to consider careers in education and teaching (consider Breakthrough Collaborative as an example).
Second, teacher preparation programs need to prioritize strategic marketing, particularly in places where intrinsic motivation for teaching occurs more naturally (think: high schools, college campuses and child care centers).
Third, school districts could consider teacher motivations as part of their hiring process. Considering all else equal, it may be worth gaining insight into applicants’ interest in teaching, since our research indicates some motivations lead to more effective and longer tenured teachers than others.
Through these recommendations, classrooms across the nation can begin to utilize teacher motivations to enhance student learning.
Login
